3of3NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 05: Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss attend the world premiere of "Ocean's 8" at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center on June 5, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)Photo: Taylor Hill / Getty Images

GREENWICH — Internet entrepreneurs and Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have donated $10 million to Greenwich Country Day School, the largest philanthropic alumni donation in the history of the private school.

“We are so thankful to Cameron and Tyler for their generous donation to GCDS,” Headmaster Adam Rohdie said. “They have maintained a close relationship with the school over the years.”

Each brother, famous for suing Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, donated $5 million, which will contribute to the next two phases of the project to build the GCDS Upper School, including a Performing Arts Center. They were both members of the Class of 1997 at GCDS and went on to graduate from Brunswick, Harvard and Oxford.

The facility will be called the Amanda Gesine Winklevoss Performing Arts Center, in honor of their sister, a GCDS ’94 alumna, who had a passion for the performing arts. The center will be built on the new Stanwich campus for GCDS, which opened its new Upper School this fall.

Amanda, who graduated from Greenwich Academy, was 23 when she died in June 2002 due to a drug overdose. She was an accomplished athlete and aspiring actress, who had just finished work on a documentary in New York City when she died.

“This gift highlights their belief that a great education is the bedrock for success and we have been proud to follow all of their successes over the years,” Rohdie said. “This gift will allow Country Day to achieve some very ambitious goals and for that we will be forever grateful to Cameron and Tyler.”

The 38-year-old identical twin brothers, nicknamed the Winklevii, filed suit against Facebook in September 2004, claiming the theft of intellectual property and saying Zuckerberg used their source code and idea from ConnectU to create TheFacebook.com. The case was settled for $65 million.

In 2008, the brothers competed in rowing for the U.S. in the Beijing Olympics, coming in sixth in the men’s pair event, and returned to GCDS in 2009 to speak about their experiences. They came again as commencement speakers for the Class of 2015 ceremony, Rohdie said.

“Our years at GCDS were transformative and ones we attribute most to the people we are today,” the brothers said in a statement.

The Winklevoss brothers are excited about the integration of technology and entrepreneurship at the new high school in particular.

“Today, and especially tomorrow, computers and technology will be everything,” the brothers said. “A person’s ability to creatively interact with machines in the future will be critical to their ability to navigate the world. The new high school will be positioned to prepare students for this future better than any other school in the world. The fact that it is being built de novo is a huge advantage — technology will be embedded in GCDS’s DNA from the very beginning.”

The two have been depicted in books and movies about the rise of Facebook. They were portrayed as privileged jocks in David Fincher’s 2010 film “The Social Network,” which was based on a book titled “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich. The author recast them in his 2019 book “Bitcoin Billionaires,” about how the twins made billions investing in cryptocurrency at its inception.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss graduated from Harvard University with degrees in economics in 2004 and earned their master of business administration degrees from Oxford University in 2010.

Cameron and Tyler have been angel investors and entrepreneurs in emerging technologies since 2003. They began investing in bitcoin in 2012 and launched Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange and custodian in 2015.

Jo Kroeker is a reporter covering education for Greenwich Time. Before joining Greenwich Time, she interned for a summer at The Fresno Bee, her hometown paper, and The Detroit News. She is fluent in French, which she studied while living in Tours, France, for four months.